I am, admittedly, a huge lesson planning nerd. Actually, I should say, I am a huge unit planning nerd. Individual lessons aren't really my passion, but an intricately planned unit of study with engaging lessons that build -up to a beautiful summative task?

That's it! That's what I love.

A few years ago, I was working at a school where each ELA teacher taught 4 sections of the same grade level. And my best friend & favorite teacher ever, Diego Mendoza, taught Grade 11, while I taught Grade 12. I've always admired Diego's ability to intricately weave individual lessons into a conceptual masterpiece of a summative task. 

Then, one day, I found the best ELA teaching blog: The Readiness is All, by David Theriault. And he had the most ORIGINAL take on Socratic Seminars: Let’s BRAWL: Throwing Socratic Seminars out of the ring. Diego & I poured over this post...there had to be a way to make something like this work with our 8 combined classes!

Theriault's idea for transforming Socratic seminars is this:

BRAWL: Battle Royal All Will Learn– A BRAWL is a team-based competitive Socratic Seminar where students learn how to develop their own discussion questions based on purpose/tone/theme and style analysis and then prepare and answer those questions.

The acronym is based on “The Big Brawl” a movie starting Jackie Chan (Theriault, 2015)

Finally we had it: Lucha Libre.

We were teaching at an International School in the heart of colonial Mexico and it was almost September 15th: Independence Day. We got ourselves some Lucha Libre Masks &,  of course, some title belts for the winners.

Then, we set about to adapt Theriault's idea. Basically, we used his idea, shifting it to the number of classes, instructional hours, and course concepts we were teaching.

Fortunately, we were teaching 2 different grades of the IB Higher Level Language and Literature program, which allowed us to overlap a unit of study, despite having 2 different grade levels. This allowed us to have the same objectives and concepts being addressed. We made the teams, created the rubrics, and worked on the logistics:

• Shared documents among each team helped with their question generation & preparation
• Rubrics were loaded into Turnitin's Feedback Studio & a set of shared QuickMarks were created to grade both the pre-assignments and the final Lucha Libre.
• A Grading Form was created in Feedback Studio for each student ahead of time to quickly grade each student's Lucha Libre performance

The key to this project was really in creating student buy-in. If we wanted them to be engaged in their learning, excited, and willing to take risks in their learning, we were going to have to take some risks ourselves:

With each of our 8 classes, we dressed-up in full Lucha Libre outfits, walked into class with a hype-music and even recruited an announcer to hype-up our arrival to class even more.  We displayed, with great pride, the $10 peso (~$1)  title belts that could be won by the winning classes.

And that was it. 

The students took the lead. They organized their allotted class time into research, planning, and sharing time. They even came up with team names, their own hype music!  Diego & I looked on with pride as the students, unbeknownst to them at the time, were doing all of the "exam" as they prepared.  That's the key with the Socratic method, and more so with Theriault's competitive Socratic method: the learning is in the preparing. I'll always remember one of my students coming up to me at the end of their final Lucha Libre round, shocked and in disbelief, exclaiming, "it's not even, really, about this activity! You both tricked us... we learned it in our teams before we even got here!" And they did. They understood the concepts and ideas at a deep, insightful level that never could have been achieved through traditional summative assessments.

Teacher lessons learned: be brave, go all in, take risks & they will too!